On March 26 1977 I was flicking the four terrestrial
channels in my Hong Kong hotel room when, through a blizzard of static,
up popped Beijing TV with an unscheduled programme. On screen, to my
amazement, sat a symphony orchestra. A conductor walked on, raised his
arms and struck up the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. I checked
the calendar. It was the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s death and the
regime had chosen that moment to announce the end of the Cultural
Revolution.

The symbolism was unmistakable. During the Red Guards’ decade-long
rampage, China’s orchestras had been disbanded and their players sent
for ‘re-education’ in the rice paddies. Violinists had their fingers
broken, oboists their teeth smashed. People caught listening to western
music suffered physical abuse and imprisonment.

Yet the severity of these sanctions served only to underline the
disproportionate significance that China attached to the orchestra,
whether as a potentially subversive non-party organism or as an import
channel of foreign culture. In China, the orchestra is more than just a
pretty sound.

Chinese musicians brag that Shanghai founded the first orchestra in the
eastern hemisphere as far back as 1879 and the first symphonic ensemble
in 1908, a centenary that has been celebrated this year across the
country as a matter of national pride. It is also eighty years since
the first orchestral work by a Chinese composer, Reminiscence by Huang
Zi. The orchestra in China was a driver of national culture as much as
it was a mirror of European civilisation.

When the music conservatory reopened in Beijing in 1978, the doors were
battered down by 18,000 applicants. As musicians and conductors
returned from rural or foreign exile, the makers of modern China
applied the old Maoist slogan ‘let 1,000 flowers bloom’ to the reborn
orchestral sector. With the support of the piano-playing, Mozart-loving
party leader Jiang Zemin, China started to grow the busiest concert
industry on earth.

The statistics tell it all. A recent survey by the German orchestral
association shows that there are presently 561 professional orchestras
in the world, working 31 weeks a year with enough players for a
Beethoven Fifth. The largest batch is in Germany, which has 133
orchestras (down from 166 since reunification). Next is the USA with 50
ensembles (excluding college and amateur groups), and coming up fast
behind is China, already with twice as many orchestras as Britain or
France and with new ones being formed practically every other month.

At an Asia-Pacific orchestral conference in Shanghai last week,
directors of the China Symphony Development Foundation told me they now
have 43 orchestras around the country, with six more in formation. By
the end of the decade, China will be second only to Germany in the
number of orchestras it maintains, and closing fast.

‘There is healthy competition,’ one official told me. ‘When one city in
China gets an orchestra, the next town wants one too.’ Nor is there a
shortage of audiences. The concert season consists of varied programmes
of western, Chinese and film music, among which works like Ma Hongye's
Good News Reaches the Border Villages enjoy unmitigated popularity.

The standard of performance is unapologetically elitist with
proficiency improving year by year as young musicians return from
European and US conservatories and foreigners being recruited at open
auditions. A concert of contemporary Chinese music that I attended,
played by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra with four soloists on
indigenous instruments, did not fall short from western critical
criteria of ensemble and harmony. It was an attractive, polished
performance, delivered to an almost-full house.

Chinese orchestras are starting to strut their stuff abroad. The China
Philharmonic Orchestra performed this year for the Pope in Rome and
Shanghai will soon make a tour of Spain. New concert halls are
springing up, not just the Olympic-timed National Centre for Performing
Arts in Beijing but an unimaginably ambitious $21.6 billion (sic) arts
district in Hong Kong, a project which is attracting managerial
interest from, among others, London’s outgoing South Bank chief,
Michael Lynch.

By the time London hosts the Olympics in 2012, China will be
challenging for pre-eminence in orchestral music. In much the same way
as Chinese factories took over Italy’s hegemony in making shoes, shirts
and silk ties, the orchestras of China will be offering themselves at
cheaper rates to the movie and games industries, undermining London’s
grip on the lucrative soundtrack market. Or so the strategy goes.

But beyond the façade of relentless expansion, a more fragile and
fascinating picture emerges of red-toothed Darwinian evolution at the
heart of a command economy. When officials speak of ‘healthy
competition’, what they mean is local rivalry. The Shanghai
Philharmonic was absent from last week’s summit after a falling-out
with the Shanghai Symphony. Inside the Shanghai Symphony, there are
sour mutterings over the appointment of Long Yu, a man with high party
connections, as the new music director. Long, 44 and Berlin-trained,
is already director of the China Philharmonic and the Beijing Music
Festival. Some say he is trying to become China’s first musical
emperor, its Herbert von Karajan.

Long is the favoured conductor of China’s biggest musical star, the
pianist Lang Lang, whose celebrity since the Olympic opening exploits
has soared beyond the abstruse requirements of classical music onto
skyscraper-sized hoardings and credit-card endorsements. Lang Lang, in
his media ubiquity, is an important role model to the 30-40 million
Chinese children who are taking piano lessons, but he is also a
contentious and divisive figure within the burgeoning musical
infrastructure.

Orchestra managers told me they can no longer afford fee demands of a
million RMB (just over £100,000) for a Lang Lang concerto performance,
not to mention other other superstar conditions. One manager was told
by Lang Lang’s father than his son would not play with his orchestra if
his arch-rival Yundi Li was engaged in the same year. Yundi, winner of
the 2000 Chopin competition in Warsaw and an artist of significantly
quieter attributes, appears to gone into retreat, moving his residence
to offshore Hong Kong.

Amid whispers that Lang Lang’s enmity has cost Yundi Li his foreign
management and record contract - Deutsche Grammophon confirmed to me
that the pianist has indeed been dropped, but did not comment on the
cause - Chinese managers relish the cut and thrust of music business,
even though all major decisions are party controlled. The secretive
interplay of politics and culture makes it difficult to predict the
full flowering of China’s musical future, but the symbolic value of the
orchestral renaissance should not be underestimated. China is building
big orchestras as a symptom of economic power and its business classes
are attending concerts in their thousands as a way of renouncing the
grim and never-mentioned revolutionary past. The orchestras of China
may or may not become world beaters, but to many Chinese they stand out
as beacons of hope in increasingly uncertain times.